A Cooling Trend Toward Global Warming April 1, 2009

Over the past several years, it appeared that our society was doomed to succumb to what Weather Channel founder John Coleman has described as “the greatest scam in history”: anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW). For two decades there has been an incessant drumbeat of propaganda attributing every weather-related event to an increase in carbon dioxide caused by the burning of fossil fuels. With the election of a president who is solidly in the global-warming-alarmist camp – and with many high-level appointees who are bona fide climate-change alarmists – coupled with a Democratic legislature anxious to please their environmentalist and media benefactors, the passage of legislation causing some form of economy-crippling energy taxation seemed to be a foregone conclusion.

But then came the unexpected: a recession brought on and exacerbated by the heavy hand of government, and a second consecutive severe winter. Indeed, we may look back and see that our current financial crisis and Mother Nature were the saviors of free-market capitalism. They may have slowed the statist steamroller long enough for the proponents of climate realism to make such socialistic schemes as “cap and trade” understood for what they are and what they are not. They are not about anything to do with global warming or climate change. They are instead a massive transfer of wealth from the productive to those who will not adopt free markets.

While the primary promoters of the warming hoax have not “broken and run” yet, there is much evidence that there is an increasing tide of defectors and that climate catastrophists have completely run out of dry powder.

Temperatures Stopped Increasing

Satellite data from NASA shows no increase in average global temperature since 1998, a year when El Nino caused a worldwide spike having nothing to do with carbon dioxide. Alarmists contend this is just a pause in a continuous rise in temperatures and that it will begin to increase again. Ironically that is the same argument that the warming skeptics have been using for years. There was warming for the first 40 years of the 20th century until the very time CO2 began to climb significantly – and then came cooling, which sparked concerns in the ‘70s about a looming Ice Age. Then rising temperatures resumed until 1998 and now we’re back on a cooling trend. This fits well with a general planetary warm up, but is in conflict with climate forcing by CO2 that calls for a continuous upward temperature movement.

Unfortunately for the alarmists, nothing seems sacred these days. It has long been known that the disintegration of the Soviet Union ended temperature data from large parts of that country, especially Siberia. Without massive re-calculations to exclude temperature readings from these stations during the Soviet era, a significant increase in global temperatures would be seen from the absence of this data during the post-Soviet period. From available literature there is no indication that any meteorological body went to such trouble. But what about the weather data from the United States – the “best in the world”?

In his presentation at the International 2009 Conference on Climate Change, 25-year veteran meteorologist Anthony Watts showed alarming data for the global-warming alarmists. But first we should note that the global temperature rise that we are supposed to be concerned over was less than 1�C for the entire 20th century, meaning minor errors in measurements can contribute significantly to an apparent warming trend. Watts was certainly aware of the “urban island” effect that causes cities like Tucson to have temperature increases three times those of surrounding rural measurement stations. But how have reporting stations, “urbanized” by a spreading population, been affected? With 650 volunteers, more than 860 of the National Weather Service’s 1,221 climate-monitoring stations were inspected and photographically documented. Of these, 89 percent did not meet the Weather Service’s own requirement of being 30 meters away from artificial heating or reflecting sources such as pavements or building.

Public Opinion Is Shifting

According to a January Rasmussen poll, 44 percent of U.S. voters now say “long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming � up from 35 percent two years ago, while only 41 percent blame it on human activity, down from 47 percent. The remainder either attribute global warming to some other reason or are unsure. This means that only about 4 in 10 of the polled “expected voters” are still falling for the “greatest scam.”

For the alarmists to pass their “cap and trade” or “carbon tax” legislation – the purpose of all this turmoil – they must do so before the awakened voters reach the 70-percent level, at which point some political analysts believe that even many liberal Democrats will abandon a sinking ship. Read more here.

What do public opinion polls have to do with this issue? This is an issue of science, and can only be settled by scientific experiment. It doesn’t matter whether 99% of the population believes that carbon dioxide increases are related to global warming, or whether 99% believes the opposite. What matters is what the science shows. What matters is data. What matters is what is actually happening. If you are interested in proving that increasing CO2 does not cause the temperature to rise, then you need to do a scientific experiment to prove that. The issue cannot be settled by debate.